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This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence and models for teaching the contextual nature of research.
Here, I’m going to address a question about why I’d chosen the term “research” rather than “information literacy” to frame my discussion.
To answer this, let me begin with a story.
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Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg is one of those writing books which seems very familiar to me in the sense that I feel like I’ve seen the cover somewhere before but I have no memory of whether or not I’ve actually read it.
In this case, I think I did try to read Writing Down the Bones at one point, maybe when I was a teenager. I imagine that the chapter titles like “Fighting Tofu” might have put me off at the time. I didn’t want weird philosophical stuff. I wanted to know how to write. I wanted to know the rules. But not, like, The Elements of Style-type rules. The rules of story writing. I needed to know if I was getting it right.
I’d like to say that as an adult I’m less concerned with “the rules.” The truth is, I still read writing advice primarily to discern if what I’m already doing is “right” rather than to learn something new. But I’m a little more open to Natalie Goldberg’s approach now than I probably would have been as a teenager.
Of course, I’m now also interested in the role of research in creative writing.
So one of my big goals for this blog is to start a conversation around the study of research, among other things. I’m at the beginning stages of figuring out what that might look like and how to get it started and even set up a new page with some details about what I would be looking for. But I also wanted to share some vague notions here to at least get the ball rolling.
Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay
This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previously, I addressed a great question I got about student overconfidence.
In addition to that, there were a couple of questions related to models for teaching the contextual nature of research. I answered them as best I could in the moment, but wanted to share some further thoughts.
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So there was an article in The Atlantic this month by Elizabeth Winkler about whether the works attributed to William Shakespeare might have actually been written by a woman named Emilia Bassano. It is fascinating. Highly recommended.
Like, I kind of knew that there were some disagreements out there about who might have actually authored Shakespeare’s plays. But I had no idea how many gaps and inconsistencies there were in the historical record that scholars have trouble explaining when they’re defending Shakespeare as the author. The information in this article makes the case in his favor seem surprisingly weak.
But why am I writing about this here? Well, a core piece of the argument against Shakespeare and in Bassano’s favor is related to the amount of research that would have gone into creating these plays and other works.
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In the interest of full disclosure, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott has always held a special place on my bookshelf. The copy I own is one I bought for a creative writing class way back when I was an undergrad in a creative writing program. And while there are a couple of books on the list I had read before starting this project, this was the only one I’d read more than once.
Usually when I read this book, it’s because my writing isn’t going as well as I want it to and I need something to make me feel better. This time, I was reading it for much different reasons and I was surprised by what I learned.
Here are some thoughts I had on Bird by Bird.
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Last month, I did a webcast for the ACRL virtual conference called “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” It was a great experience (and a great conference!). There were some really interesting questions during the Q&A part of the presentation and I wanted to take some space here to answer some of them a little more fully now that I’ve had some more time to think about them.
So this is the first in what will probably be a series of entries addressing some of the questions I got, starting with one about student proficiency versus student confidence.
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I’m not sure at what point in your college career you’re supposed to start seriously thinking about what you want to do for a living after you graduate. I suspect if I asked my students now, they would tell me that this is something they were expected to figure out in high school. That they’ve entered college with an eye toward earning whatever degree is most marketable in whatever field is currently experiencing a lot of growth.
For me, there was never any question about what I wanted to study. I’d known I wanted to be an English major since approximately the sixth grade. But it took until my junior year of college for me to realize that I needed to figure out what, exactly, I wanted to do with that degree once I graduated. So I left it kinda late.
Knowing this, I went to a writing professor of mine for advice. I told him I had looked at a number of possible career paths, including librarianship.
“Don’t become a librarian,” he said. “Librarians are losers. They’re all just failed writers.”
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“Research is an Activity and a Subject of Study” was a bit of a departure for me, publication-wise. Before that, the scholarly articles I’d written were more practical in nature, things that described successful projects so others might adapt those projects for their own purposes. It was a model I’d had some pretty good success with and enjoyed writing and had planned to continue. But then an idea started itching at the back of my mind.
This idea was completely different from anything I’d tried writing before. I didn’t know here to start or whether it even made sense. But I did it anyway and this is what I learned.
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So in case you missed it, I’m working on a project to read through ten popular books on creative writing to learn whether and how they talk about the role of research in the creative writing process.
The books I chose came from a list on Goodreads. On Writing by Stephen King is pretty consistently at the top of that list which is no surprise, considering King’s massive popularity. What aspiring writer wouldn’t want to know what one of the most successful authors of all time (if not THE most successful author) has to say about his craft?
Personally, I would describe myself as a casual Stephen King fan. I’ve read a few of his books here and there and sometimes return to my old favorites (The Stand, The Drawing of the Three). This was my first time returning to On Writing since first reading it as a teenager. I had no memory of whether King addresses the role of research at all. I did, however, remember the thing about adverbs.
Below are some thoughts.
Studying Research 